11 reasons you need the MediaTek Helio P23 in your next Android smartphone

Reason 1: Awesome camera tech

The P23 has almost P30/X30-level camera tech inside. The P23 can support either 13+13MP dual cameras or a single 24MP camera, but it lacks the energy saving hardware VPU. The dual camera system does allow a flexible combination of camera types, such as mono+color sensors for low-light performance or wide+tele lenses for exciting depth-of-field effects.

Reason 2: Imagiq

Great camera hardware is nothing without good software. MediaTek's Imagiq includes technologies that minimize aliasing, grain, provide denoising (MFNR), chromatic aberration correction and motion compensation techniques, across both normal and low-light conditions to improve both photography and videography.

Reason 3: Plenty of CPU cores at ludicrous speed

The application processor part of the P23 has eight CPU cores of ARM Cortex-A53 operating at up to 2.3GHz. All the cores can be active at once, giving it tons of performance even if you’re a heavy multi-tasker.

Reason 4: Latest graphics hardware

The Mali G71 graphics core has the latest and most powerful GPU technology with a new design offering 1.5x the performance over previous generation. Operating at up to 770MHz in the P23, the ‘Bifrost’ architecture has unified shader cores, OpenCL, OpenGL ES and Vulcan API support for games and apps.

Reason 5: CorePilot 4.0

While P23 isn't tri-cluster like the X-series, it still has the advantages of the latest CorePilot 4.0 with Energy Aware Scheduling. This involves user experience (UX) monitoring and thermal management. CorePilot 4.0 monitors all the tasks between CPU and GPU areas, optimizing the power used to deliver both great performance and battery life.

Reason 6: LPDDR4x

In short: lots of memory bandwidth for all the above mentioned SoC hardware, but it only uses a fraction of the power of older LPDDR3. We’ve covered the in’s and out’s of LPDDR4x tech in a dedicated blog post.

Reason 7: Cat-7 (download) / Cat-13 (upload) 4G LTE

With speeds of up to 300/150MBit and stuff like 2x20MHz Carrier Aggregation and 64QAM, the Cat-7/13 combo is still faster than most people's home broadband, and the increased upload speed means its faster to save all your photos and videos to Cloud storage (like Google Drive, Dropbox etc) so there's no interruption when you need other apps.

Reason 8: 4G Dual SIM, Dual VoLTE

With 2G/3G services in the planning or process of being retired globally, a smartphone with two 4G LTE SIM slots is certainly a future-proof investment. Having two SIMs means you can either mix and match the best deals on data, or call and data, if you're a frequent business traveller then you can just take one phone with two numbers for both personal and business needs. 4G LTE services also mean access to VoLTE and ViLTE calls on both SIMs, which are notably faster to connect and better quality. MediaTek has always lead in DSDS (dual SIM dual standby) technologies, and is again the first to market with this dual 4G SIM solution.

Reason 9: Smart Antenna technology (TAS 2.0)

MediaTek's second generation smart antenna technology (TAS 2.0) can automatically detect and picks the best antenna in your phone, so no matter how or where you hold it, or which direction you face, TAS 2.0 will optimize the signal for quality and connection reliability. The other positive effect is reduced power use, as it means less signal boosting is required. Pretty neat!

Reason 10: 600MHz 4G LTE support

600MHz is a new 4G LTE frequency for T-Mobile in North America. This new frequency can enhance signal quality and coverage in some scenarios.

Reason 11: All this hardware for only little $.

The Helio P23 brings all this incredible hardware to affordable Android smartphones. No other Android smartphone SoC is this feature-filled, fast and power-efficient, and it doesn't cost the earth for a new phone - awesome!